RAID controller. Don't shoot me, but try upgrading the firmware. If that doesn't work (and it probably won't), replace. They're not that expensive.
Could be, although in this case, AFAIK, it means a new server. The Dell NAS is a single pizza-box rackmount with four EIDE fast swap chassis on the front face. It's all one board inside, with the exception of a backplane SCSI adaptor for the tape drive system they used to use, or to bridge it over to a bigger chassis with more drives in it.
At $70 for a new 300gb drive, it's not a big expense to test. It would even be cheaper if this box was new enough to support SATA instead of PATA... These are just a bunch of WD Caviars, with one Maxtor thrown in for excrement and giggles. (I'm guessing a repair no one remembers or has documented...) Drive 1 is what's acting funky, so I've just left it out all day and it's been stable, other than all the warnings in the RAID manager....
And as I'm typing this, it just spontaneously shut itself down... :rolleyes:
The two things that have me absolutely scratching my head is that the data volumes are all striped RAID 5, but they only mirrored the C volume with the system folder. Was it done for a percieved performance boost? Of course, it's one of the mirrored drives that failed, leaving me flying naked until the new drives come in and it can clone and rebuild itself.
The second is that this damn thing has no removeable media. No CD-Rom, or anything. That's not at all uncommon in a larger datacenter, where you run a central PXE server to bootstrap etc. But it tells me here they were just relying on the instance of Win2k the server shipped with, with no real plan of how to do a full recovery if it needed to be rebuilt.
What fun...